MY SELF-IDENTITY JOURNEY THROUGH THE LABELS I HAVE INTERACTED WITH with your guide Don Juan Pan
Words
by Guillermo Corona
PREFACE PREFACE
Charles Cooley posited that there are 3 steps to how interactions with others form our self-identity:
How we imagine we appear to others
How we imagine others’ judgements of that appearance The feelings & responses that we develop from those imagined judgements
At times, in my youth, I thought I was too Americanized to be Latino. And yet, seen as too Mexican to be American. Too white and pale to be Brown; too tan to be white.
(Too queer to fit in with la raza)
My Spanish, broken, became the focal point of the imagined judgements.
Had I asked abuela what I was,she’dsay“americano.”
This was her mindset. She y abuelo were Mexican, pero her children y grandchildren wereamericano.
In all sense of the word, I was
Americanized
To this day, my Spanish still isn’tthebest. ButIdigress...
HISPANIC HISPANIC
My friend Doug thought I was white like him. On the day Miss Smith called me by my name, he scrawled an incredulous look upon his face.
“Who the fuck is Guillermo? I thought your name was [redacted]!”
I never felt
HISPANIC
Hispanic was a bubble to fill on a job application or the US census. This is how the government perceived me.
